Waking the Dead
by Tally Mark
Summary: Bringing back the dead is harder than Kagome thought, especially when she hardly knows what life is herself. And especially when they're not really dead. SessKag
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** If I owned Inuyasha, my family and I wouldn't be dirt-poor, and I'd have steady health insurance. But I don't! (I'd also make Sess the star. Sigh).

Anyway, please forgive the monster length of this chapter – hopefully it'll be entertaining enough to make up for it – and enjoy!

* * *

Dry leaves and pine needles crackled under Kagome's feet. The sun sluiced through the trees in flashes, raining light, and it was so familiar her heart ached. She could smell the wind as it rose along the mountainside, and it tasted _ancient_, and wild, and alive. It hummed with long ago summers. 

"Hurry up, Kagome," her grandfather cackled, skipping along the path ahead, "you're not going to let this old man outdo you, are you?"

She ducked under a low branch. "Grampa, are you sure you're up to this?"

"Pah," he sniffed. "This is hardly more than a stroll. Come, come, we're almost there."

Souta grinned back at her. "You're gonna love this, Kagome."

Kagome tried to keep up but soon found herself hanging back again. They'd left the mountain trail a while ago, following signs and landmarks that only her grandfather seemed to know, and it was so untouched, so perfect and painfully beautiful that she wanted to savor it.

It had been too long since she had been to a place like this. When her grandfather had called her at school, demanding she take the day off to come home for her birthday - and threatening to tell the university she had meningitis if she even _thought_ about going to class first - Kagome had been rather alarmed. Her grandfather was…an imaginative man.

Imagine her surprise when her mother ushered her to the car and drove into the low mountains that fringed the outskirts of Tokyo, announcing a hike.

Kagome did not like to make a big fuss about birthdays. Truth be told, she didn't really like them. The universe was funny with her and birthdays. But this, she had to admit, was something she needed.

Here, in this wild place, the past was so heavy that she breathed it in, clean and old and deep and lovely, and she _yearned_. She wanted to laugh and cry, bleed and heal, _remember and remember and remember_.

They'd meandered over the low, rolling slopes all day. Now, with the light beginning to turn a hazy afternoon gold, her grandfather had suddenly up and took them in a totally different direction, announcing that the best part was yet to come.

"Yes, yes," Grampa chuckled, peering through the trees up at the rocky outcropping before them, craggy boulders sunk in the grass, "your old man has really outdone himself this time, Kagome."

She picked her way through the rocks after him, half-climbing up the last part of the incline, pushing branches out of her way with both hands. Light slanted around her, and -

Two ancient statues towered above her.

"_Oh,"_ she breathed.

It was a pair of temple dogs, like the kind that guarded Shinto shrines - _Koma inu_, or _shishi_. The mouth of the left statue was open, roaring in endless defiance; the right had its mouth shut, silent, watchful. They were magnificent. Sun-baked stone appeared in flashes beneath the moss and ivy that spread across the massive bases and twisted up their legs.

"Happy Birthday, Kagome," her brother said quietly.

Kagome reached out and ran her fingertips along the worn stone. They were done in the classic style, with fearsome faces and great elaborate curls of fur, almost lion-like. They were carved exquisitely, from the flowing tails to the regal manes.

She let a small smile tug at her lips when her grandfather began to lecture her brother. "_Koma inu_ have been guarding temple gates for centuries," he said to Souta, "and are unique to Japan." He waved a hand at the statues. "But, since there's no dog alive today that even resembles the _Koma inu_, historians are certain it is a borrowed style, inspired by the famous Chinese lion statues. The style was simply stuck on a dog for lack of a better native animal."

At Kagome's snort he glanced back at her, laughter in his eyes

They all knew Kagome's secret theory - that centuries ago, an artist had sat down to carve something _real_. Something they had seen. That _Koma inu_ had started out as statues of the Great youkai dogs, like the Inu no Taisho.

There was no mistaking it for anything else; she knew a youkai dog when she saw it. After all, she had met the real thing.

Seeing a youkai dog in their true form wasn't like seeing an animal, she reflected as she fingered the jewel around her neck, it was like seeing…a _phenomenon_. In fact, that described Sesshoumaru pretty well overall: a phenomenon, like a thunderstorm, or an earthquake, or a monsoon. When Hurricane Sesshoumaru rolled through - _fur crackling with sheer youki, venom raining from his jaws_ - you didn't forget it.

As her family chatted and settled down in the grass, she found herself suddenly wondering what had happened to the icy demon prince. She hadn't thought of him for some time, but now that she had, the question of his ultimate fate flared up her curiosity. Had he died of old age, or been killed in some great battle? Could he even still be alive? For some reason the idea had never even occurred to her before. But it was rather unlikely, she decided; he was not the inconspicuous sort.

_People would've noticed all the wanton killing_, she thought ruefully. Plus, in the past two years she hadn't sensed enough youki to fill a teacup.

No, time had taken him, one way or another, as time was so fond of doing.

"A house once stood here," Grampa then said, pulling her from her thoughts, "but it burned down centuries ago, leaving only these."

"A house?" Kagome frowned slightly. "I thought _shishi_ were only used for temples and graves."

Her grandfather shrugged. "The writings state it was a house. Very little really is known about the story behind these statues," he said, and she hid a grin at the touch of sulk in his voice. Everything was supposed to have a story in his eyes. "They say the house belonged to a kind and beautiful princess. The house burned down not long after she passed away, and no one ever tried to rebuild it."

Kagome found herself only half-listening; something else was niggling at the back of her mind. "Grampa," she said, frowning again, "why are they on the wrong sides?"

"Hm?" He peered up at them. "Why, so they are. I can't imagine why."

"Huh?" Souta said.

"They're switched. The male is supposed to be on the right." She shook her head at his blank face and waved a hand at the statues. "It's all _symbolism_. They represent Ah and Un, life and death. One always has its mouth open, to frighten away bad spirits. That's the male, and he goes on the right. The other always has its mouth shut, to hold in good spirits. That's usually the female, and she goes on the left. These are reversed."

"I dunno," he said, "they both look like guys to me."

Kagome swatted him and he ran off, laughing; in fact her whole family was getting ready to leave.

"Thank you for bringing me here, you guys. They're beautiful." Kagome ran her hands along its leg again, wanting to sink them into the sun-warmed stone.

"Oh, we're not just _showing_ them to you," her mother said. "They're being delivered next month."

"What?" Suddenly all her ephemeral nostalgia formed a hard lump in her stomach. She didn't _want_ them moved - she wanted this one piece of the past to be perfect forever. Besides, move them? They were massive! If she stood on her toes and stretched she could pat their chins.

Her grandfather seemed to see through her pasted smile and understand. "Let me explain. The other side of this mountain is a natural preserve - but this side is not." He let out a deep sigh. "They're building a mine here in the spring. A team of archeologists found the statues while they were scouting the site and the company is most desperate to get rid of them."

Grampa eased himself down on a rock carefully, and her mother continued for him. "They cannot stay here. The Society for the Preservation of Historical Artifacts decided that they should go to a local shrine."

"I daresay every shrine in the city has been petitioning for them," Grampa interrupted again with a laugh. "However," he grinned with a wink, "Higurashi shrine was the only one that could boast about having a real young miko to carry on the traditions."

"I'm not a real miko," she protested. She'd met the _real_ deal there, too. "But," she said, looking up at the sun-kissed statue, "I won't look a gift dog in the mouth."

And for a brief moment, she almost felt like magic had come back into her life.

She could hear her mother let out a breath when they saw her smile, a _real_ one. Mama was always telling her to smile more, like she used to.

And it was real. If she could not save this sacred place, she thought, then she would just have to take joy in the fact that they were saving these. They were a piece of the past, just like her, and it was only fitting that they be guarded by someone who knew what it was to be a lost relic in a modern world.

As they finally started back down the trail and she looked over her shoulders at the two stone dogs, she had a very strange thought. Inuyasha would have called her crazy, but in that moment, seeing the two dogs silhouetted against the sun, she felt bizarrely sad for Sesshoumaru. It _was_ stupid, really, mourning the long-ago death of a demon lord who hadn't been particularly nice to her. But then, she mourned people who died a long time ago a lot.

Sometimes she thought that maybe that was all her role had ever really been.

- - -

About four weeks later, while perched soaking wet on the head of a slippery stone dog, she found herself thinking about Sesshoumaru again.

She had not thought about him much since that first day, except in the context of everything else in the past, which she thought about a great deal. She had found all kinds of excuses to go visit the statues over the last few weeks. On weekends she would drive up to the mountains and spend her afternoons there, reading books or doing homework in the grass. Sometimes she would just lie there for hours.

Sometimes she would cry.

She had started to take care of the statues. She cleaned off all the ivy, and without it she could see that the hundreds of winters they'd endured had left a network of cracks and gouges, some of them deep. The silent right statue was the worst hit, though it looked like someone had tried to repair the crack that went across its right eye. But they didn't finish, and it looked to be one of the deeper cracks, which saddened her a bit. She could empathize with the statue. The years had been hard on her too.

It was really a bad idea to spend so much time there, what with her schoolwork and her job, but the place drew her, and it was cathartic in a somewhat self-destructive way. It was almost as though time felt thin here, and if she tried hard enough maybe she could reach out and -

But that was a foolish thought, and a dangerous one, and her wishful heart needed to just _shut up_ about it.

It went on like that until a week before the stone dogs were due to be moved and the first trucks and construction vehicles had started to move in, looming alien among the trees. It had then rained for a straight three days, keeping both Kagome and the workers away.

When the sun finally broke free she drove up to see them in their true home one last time. The storm had covered the statues with branches and wet leaves and Kagome spent nearly two hours clearing them off. The trees around were huge and ancient, so the branches were too. Most she could just drag off, but some required real lifting, and some she had to clamber up on their backs to reach.

This was how she had found herself sopping wet, covered in soggy leaves, sitting on the shoulders of the female _Koma inu_ and slowly, carefully, climbing onto its head. Praying to whatever god would favor her that she didn't break anything - be it the statue or herself. But there was a forked leafy branch stuck on Mrs. _Shishi_'s nose, and damned if she was going to leave it there.

She hefted herself up and reached between the ears, patting herself on the back for surviving thus far. _Death by sheer clumsiness would be a horribly embarrassing way to go_.

Her heart gave a jump as one sneaker slipped squeakily. _And yet, it would be so totally me._

Her arms stubbornly refused to be long enough to reach the branch, so she scooted forward till she was sitting atop its head. With a victory cheer she at last managed to toss away the offending foliage. "Hah!" she said to it. "Taught you a lesson, I did. Hmph."

She swung her legs back and forth, looking at the sky.

_You'd better hope_, her mind commented, as though it had no involvement in the situation whatsoever, _that you don't have to wait for someone to come get YOU down._ For, from her high perch, facing totally the wrong direction, it appeared that getting down was going to be twice as hard as getting up.

Damn it.

She frowned at the gape-mouthed statue across from her. It seemed to be laughing. "You shut up," she told it. That one always had reminded her of Inuyasha.

She should probably make an attempt soon - the statue _was_ several centuries old. But working her way backwards across its muzzle didn't seem to be a good idea. So she proceeded, with no small amount of masterful acrobatics, to turn herself around and face the way down.

_There was a crescent moon scratched into its forehead_.

She blinked and the world flipped over, and she landed with a bone-bruising jolt in – thankfully - a very deep sludgy mud puddle.

For a long minute, she lay there on her back in the mud, staring at the sky.

And then she was on her feet and half-way up the statue's shoulders, planting her palms on its forehead, and _it was still there, oh god, oh god, it's still there, what is it doing there?_

Kagome tried to get herself under control but she appeared to be having a small but very real heart attack.

It was really a very rough scratch, she noticed, feeling a stutter behind her ribs, and it really didn't look any different than all the other scratches marring its body, except it was _crescent moon shaped_, and it was on its _forehead_, and it was a _youkai dog_.

_And that was a hell of a coincidence!_

On impulse she dashed to the other statue and scrabbled up its side, but there was no moon on its brow. But from here she could again see the mark on the other one, so obvious now that she was high enough to see it.

She slid down to the ground, dazed, and sat there for a long time.

Her body at some point got up on its own and made its way over to the Sesshoumaru-statue, and she found herself standing beneath it, looking up at its solemn face.

Now that she thought about it, gazing up at the scratches criss-crossing its head - did those two almost look like stripes? Or was she just imagining things now?

It really had been a crude mark, more of an unfinished circle than a proper crescent, but _still_ -

"You're not _really_ a statue of Sesshoumaru," she told it, looking up into its watchful eyes. "Because the odds of _me_ finding a Sesshoumaru statue sitting on a mountaintop are so low its crazy. And," she added, "the universe can't find me _that_ funny."

Kagome, traveler of time, breaker and restorer of the shikon jewel, and second year Anthropology student, realized that this was an absolute lie. If the laws of physics didn't apply to her, what chance did the laws of statistics have?

And it was a well-established fact that the universe thought Kagome was a scream.

Plus, she thought, it perhaps wasn't that the odds of finding a Sesshoumaru statue were low, but that the odds of someone _recognizing_ a Sesshoumaru statue were low.

Plus, her mind added helpfully, no amount of logic seemed to be banishing the crescent-moon-graced statue that was sitting _right in front of her, RIGHT NOW_.

Dizzily, she sank to her knees. Her fingers clenched the muddy grass while her world shifted beneath her.

The workers found her there later that afternoon, the mud on her shirt starting to dry and crack. She told them she had just slipped. She didn't care if they believed her or not. They offered to call her mother to pick her up, which snapped her out it enough to stammer out a "no thank you, I'm fine, really," and to get her feet moving back down the trail.

She climbed into the car, buckled her seatbelt, and sobbed.

She was as far from them as ever, she realized, clutching the steering wheel - all her petty attempts to fill the hole inside her with trinkets and memories and stone dogs had done nothing but make the hole bigger. No matter how much her mind pleaded, no matter how much her heart cried that surely, _surely_ this must _mean_ something, her friends were dead and gone, and her memories were all that was left of them. She was just torturing herself.

So why, _why_ couldn't she squash that part of herself that was happy?

Even as she wiped her eyes on her sleeves, there was a low, giddy thrill rising in her veins, bubbling up through her. A laugh slipped out.

A _Sesshoumaru_ statue! Here! In Tokyo!

At the very least it was funny, at the very best it was…exciting. A mystery. A spark in a pit of ashes.

And this was a dangerous thing, she knew, just like treacherous hope was, and she had to stop herself now or it would break her later.

But as a grin escaped and spread across her face - totally against her will! - she knew it was too late.

- - -

"God Kagome, you're out here again?"

Souta was standing over her, half-silhouetted in the early evening light, giving her the gruffest look he could muster. Which - even though his last growth spurt had finally beat her in the height department - was sadly lacking.

Kagome squinted up at him from where she lay on ground. "Fresh air helps me think," she finally said, hoping he wouldn't point out that her textbooks were all closed.

He threw up his hands in exasperation, heaving a mock-sigh. "Whatever. At least you're not dancing naked in the moonlight again," he said, waving a hand at the statue looming over her.

She shot to her feet. "I never did _that_, thank you very much!" She gave him a swat and he grinned and skipped backwards.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, sorry. But, it would've been funny if you had. You should - ow!" He rubbed his arm and put on a puppy face. "Ka_gome_, that one _hurt_. I was only kidding, sheesh. Anyway, mom said dinner's ready."

"Alright, alright, I'm coming, just let me get my books." She bent to gather them from where they were spread out all over the base of the statue. As she stood and dusted herself off, she looked up and met the broken-eyed gaze of the stone face above her.

Kagome sighed.

She really was wasting too much time chasing ghosts. Which had always been a bit of a problem with her, but now that she had something tangible to cling to, it was oh so much worse.

She had found over the past month, despite her early misgivings, that the discovery of the statue actually did help her in some ways - but now she was having second thoughts on how good a thing that really was. The craving that ached in her bones had not gone away, but it had changed.

To obsession.

It was no wonder curiosity killed the cat, she often thought, because for her, curiosity came in the form of a great, big white dog. With known homicidal tendencies.

The first time she had gone home to see them at the shrine was about a week after _that_ day, and it had been, as she climbed the stairs, like she was going to someone else's shrine. But when she reached the top, and saw them before her, standing in front of the red temple archway, against the backdrop of their tiny old shrine, she decided that it _worked_. It added something that had been missing ever since the well house had burned down.

It was a gap her family had been trying to fill for two years, and her family was delighted when she started visiting the shrine more - nearly every few days. That she spent nearly all of her time outside lying at the base of the statues, or inside rummaging through scrolls and records, was something they were willing to overlook.

It was funny really that she thought more of him now than she had back in the past when he was still around, even though he'd been just as much of a mystery then. Inuyasha always saw things in black and white, but she had been quick to realize that Sesshoumaru, despite his snowy appearance, had an awful lot of gray in him. Hated his brother but held back from killing him; loathed humans but took one under his wing. Killed without mercy, but not without purpose.

There was a lot of gray in her too, so despite the deep blood feud between him and Inuyasha, she'd always had a wary respect for him. In the way one respects a lion when the cage is unlocked.

She _had_ to know what had happened to him. Who had carved the statue, and why was it on the mountain? Had it been made when he was alive, or after? Why were the two figures in the wrong places? How had he died? Had he lived long?

_Had _he died?

Kagome shook her head to snap herself out of her thoughts, stuffing the last of her books in her bag. Her mother had already sent Souta; if she didn't come in soon then Mama would come out looking for her herself, and she really didn't need anymore embarrassing questions.

"'Naked in the moonlight'," she muttered, shouldering the bag. "_Humph_." She most certainly had _not_ been naked, the moonlight was incidental to the whole thing, and she wasn't dancing, she was, ah…_chanting_.

Fine, so it hadn't been one of her most flattering moments. During her obsessive musings a few weeks ago, she had entertained the thought, _briefly_, that perhaps Sesshoumaru had suffered a curse and he _was_ the statue.

If so, he was gonna be real angry when he woke up and found someone put that crack in his eye.

The thought of Sesshoumaru left to turn to dust on a mountainside had been terribly depressing though, so she went outside for three nights in a row and threw sutras and miko powers at it trying to change him back. She'd even tried the jewel.

And then her family had caught her at it - in a delightfully awkward moment - and that had been the end of her midnight spellcasting.

Eventually, several somewhat untrue explanations later, she decided the statue couldn't actually be him anyway, unless he'd acquired another leg before being stonified. And lost a _lot_ of weight.

_Maybe I have been taking this too far_, she thought with a sigh as she headed in. She'd argued mentally a hundred times that this was good for her - she at last had something to do with herself - but convincing her family she was crazy hadn't been part of the plan.

She still had her doubts that it even _was_ a Sesshoumaru statue - that the mark hadn't been just another scratch, and she was the one in a million who would mistake it for something more. But logic and obsession didn't really have much to do with each other.

Dinner, thankfully, wasn't too awkward - her family was too happy to have her home again to bring up her odd habits. Grampa had totally bought her excuse of 'miko training exercises' anyway. He'd even offered to help get her out of classes so she could practice more.

After dinner, she went straight up to her room and threw herself into her schoolbooks. Enough was enough - she'd spent all week researching Sesshoumaru instead of Mayan architecture, and unless he showed up to help her write her paper, that wasn't going to be too useful. Besides, she'd already found - to her growing frustration - that the statue apparently _was_ the only trace left of the demon lord. Even the internet had failed her, and if the internet didn't know it, no one did.

There was no record of him in any book, any myth, any story. Granted, there had been no mention of herself or her friends either, save a passing mention of the jewel, but Sesshoumaru had owned an entire region! Moreover, there was no way someone like Sesshoumaru would have gone down without a fight that would leave people talking for generations.

Which is what led some small, secret part of her to wonder if he was really dead at all. Could a youkai of his power survive unnoticed for so long? With no other youkai around, he'd be a beacon to even an untrained miko like her, but _still_. Dying seemed just as illogical. Which made her hope - treacherous, treacherous hope - more and more that he hadn't.

Just the thought of _someone,_ alive out there _somewhere_, who'd seen it all - who knew it all - was enough for her.

"Kagome?"

Kagome looked up at her mother in surprise - she hadn't heard her mother knock. A glance at the clock told her that more time had passed than she thought. "Yes, Mama?"

"Can you go bring Buyo in? It's getting dark and I can't find him."

"Sure, no problem," she said, glad to give the textbooks a break. Putting her hair in a loose twist and grabbing a flashlight, she headed out through the back and started checking all his normal spots. Fat as her tubby old cat was, he was still enough of a Tom to like roaming around in bad places.

She checked first under all the bushes flanking the house, and then up in the branches of the god tree. Then the shed, then the back of the gift shop. Then the woodpile.

With a slightly sick turn to her stomach, she approached the large, burnt square on the ground where the well house had once stood. Even two years later the grass was thin and scraggly, making the outline of the building still clear.

The temporary stairs - left over from when they cleaned away the debris - squeaked as she crept down them, shining her flashlight in all the dark corners of what had once been the lower floor but was now a glorified pit. In the center was a piece of plywood weighted down by cinder blocks. Under it was a hole in the ground that had once been a hole in time.

There was no way Buyo could have gotten under the plywood, but she slid it to the side and shined her flashlight down anyway, trembling.

But the well was empty of cats and demons, and with a sigh she slid it back in place.

By now it was getting dark enough to have to use the flashlight on the shrine grounds, and a cool autumn wind kicked up as she started to check all the _not_ normal spots.

Rounding the corner of the house, she gave a small start - there were two points of light just a short distance away, high above the ground. She swung her flashlight at it, and -

"There you are!" She put her hands on her hips and looked sternly up at her tubby kitty.

Buyo peered down at her from on top of Sesshoumaru-statue's nose, his eyes shining in the dark.

"Oh, you bad kitty, you gave me a scare. What are you doing up there you naughty boy?"

Buyo gave her a lazy _mrow_ and rolled over onto his back, as though this was a perfectly normal place for a tummy rub. "Oh no you don't, none of that," she said, "You get down here right now." She stuck her flashlight in her mouth and reached up for him, climbing up onto the stone dog's paws.

It looked so different in the dark, she thought distantly as she climbed, with the way the shadows warped it. When the flashlight hit it just _so_ as she pulled herself up a shoulder, it looked almost alive, and when it hit it right _there_ as she drew up to the muzzle and grabbed Buyo, all the scratches became black canyons, and the crack in its right eye became a chasm so deep she thought she could see stars glinting on the other side.

Then something _clicked_.

And her mind _roared_.

She dropped to the ground, Buyo in her arms. She didn't go inside. After a minute or so Buyo began to squirm and complain.

And then she was running, _running_, her breath catching in her throat, and she burst into the kitchen, dropping Buyo. Her grandfather was at the stove heating a glass of milk.

"Grampa," she said, her heart thundering in her ears, "grampa, the _princess_. The princess from the mountain. _How did the princess die?_ _What happened to her?_"

Grampa set his warm milk down, and did not say anything for a long minute. "She died as all mortals die, if they live long enough," he said, his voice quiet. "She died by time's hand: of old age."

Kagome sagged against the doorway, boneless. Puzzled at this reaction, her grandfather poured another cup for her and put it in her hands, then sat back against the counter.

"She was very old for someone of that time," he added, taking a sip of milk. He squinted as though it would help him pick the memories out of the air. "They say she was laid to rest on a bed of flowers and pearls."

His bushy eyebrows then lifted and he peered over at her in concern, for she had begun to choke on her milk and had turned a most unnatural color. "Is everything alright, Kagome?"

"Fine! Yes, yes, everything is fine!" she said, her voice squeaking. _Not fine_, her mind shrieked, _oh god, not fine!_ She coughed. "Ah, I've got to get ready for bed. Goodnight grampa."

She fled the kitchen and ran to her room, where she lay in her bed in the dark for an hour and a half. She fingered the pink jewel around her neck until she had to clutch her hands together to stop the shaking.

When she was sure her family was asleep, she slipped out the back door and went to the shed.

It must have been after midnight when she rounded the front of her house, wearing pajamas and a pair of slippers, a hammer clutched in her hands.

Her hands tightened around it with each step she drew closer to the statue, looming ominous in the dark, watching, waiting, silent. She stood before it, feeling the wind on her legs, the moon on her skin. The night was a taught string and the air was humming.

She pulled herself up till she was looking the dog in the eye. Her heart was skittering around in her chest like a caged bird. "Forgive me for defacing a historical artifact, grampa," she said. She forced a weak laugh.

Then she turned the hammer around to the two curved prongs, jammed them into the crack, and _heaved_.

Rock crumbled and something small and dark fell into the grass.

Kagome dropped with it, falling to her knees.

Trembling, she picked the object up, cupping it in her palms like it was made of eggshell and glass; of crystal thin as paper. She felt as though it would break if she breathed on it, if she breathed at all. It was smooth and dark and heavy in her hands, and warmer than she thought it would be.

"The right black pearl," she whispered, the world turning over at her words.

The pearl that had lain in a half-demons eye. The tomb of the Great Dog General. Here, right now, in her shaking hands. The same as it had been five hundred years ago when it was torn from Inuyasha's eye.

Hidden for all these years in the eye of a statue that bore his brother's mark on its brow.

"I never thought I'd see this again," she quietly breathed.

Questions loomed stormy on her mind's horizons, but at this moment all she could do was hold the pearl and marvel, wonder, tremble. She felt like she had a tiny eclipse in her hands; it was black as the new moon, with a faint sheen that made it seem to almost glow around the edges.

Her heart lurched in her chest.

It _was_ glowing – _darkly_ -

It flared, andthe night was lit up_ with black light_.

"Oh no - " she dropped it. "Wait, no - _no!_ _No!_" She threw herself backwards, but the ground somehow wouldn't hold her. She slid forward, digging her hands helplessly into the grass. "No, don't! Please, no!" Her grip failed, and then wasn't so much that she was being dragged in as she was _falling_ in - it was a black hole, a hole in _everything_ -

And the pearl that was a tomb pulsed -

And the dark light blazed around her, suns made of shadows -

And she plunged, screaming and twisting, from the sky.

* * *

**A/N:** Thank you to everyone who's suffered through that insanely long first chapter! Apologies for the obscene length – I'm an innately wordy person, but I'm trying to control myself. 

Oh, and on a technical note, _Koma inu_ are real. For anyone who's interested, you can google them for some nice pics. Unfortunately, they're not a well-known part of Japanese culture over here, so please forgive the not-so-subtle "Encyclopedia" moments. They'll be important later.

Anyway, I'd love to hear everybody's thoughts! This is sort of intended to be a strange fic so I'm not sure what people will think of it, but my muse demanded it be this way. To be perfectly honest, I'm not happy with how this chapter went, but rewriting was just making the problem worse. I'm always open to constructive criticism, just, if you're going to tell me how much it sucked, tell me _why_ (and tell me nicely? Please? Fragile ego.).

Let me know what you think!


	2. Chapter 2

So, I was stuck on this chapter for a _really, really, really_ long time (A few of you may have noticed). And then today I decided, what the heck, I wanted it to be a scene or two longer but I'll just give you all what I have. So, errr...here it is!

Oh. So, I guess in the few years I didn't update, there was some kind of land-of-the-dead storyline (along with the end of the manga and whatnot). I plotted this out before I knew about it, so, consider this to be a canon divergence from...let's say, before the shininintai storyline.

Er...I hope it was worth the wait? Eheh.

*runs*

* * *

Kagome had always had a problem with time. It had started—perhaps—when her first cat died on the day she turned six, and she had wished on her candles to not have any more birthdays.

She learned then that wishes do not come true.

However, it was not until her father died on the day she turned eleven that Kagome learned that there was something _very wrong with her_. She was afraid of time. She was _terrified_ of it.

A teacher had once told her, with clinical precision, that time meant 'the progression from past through present to future', but Kagome knew that that wasn't it at all. Time meant _never again_. She would _never_ be ten years old again. She would _never_ see her father again. She would _never_ be whole again.

Young Kagome did not believe in wishing anymore, but if she did have a wish—_if_ she did—it would be to connect to the past. To go _backward_. To have just _one more day_; to live this and that moment _one more time_; to go back to when it was _better_. There were too many little pieces of her soul still lodged in the past, one stuck to every memory, and she drew these memories around herself like a blanket and wondered why she wasn't warm. The years yawned achingly before her, and she was afraid of them.

Then, on the day she turned fifteen, the past came to claim her.

It just wasn't _her_ past.

Sometimes she wondered, during her travels, if she had wished so hard to return to the past that she had wished the extra five centuries on by accident. But—in the end—it didn't matter. Kagome found that by going _backward_ in time, she was finally able to move _forward_ in her life. And for once—maybe—she was almost whole.

Then, on the day she turned eighteen, the well burned to the ground.

And as she stumbled through the charred pieces of her life, the past nothing but smoke and memories, she wrapped herself again in that blanket of memories. Shivering.

And even though she knew better than _wishing_, even though she knew better than _hoping_, she _wished_, and she _hoped_, and she _yearned_ for some way to connect to the past once again. She knew this was why she had obsessed over the statues. Why it had become so important to know the fate of Sesshoumaru. She just wanted something—some tie, some link. Some _connection_ with the past that she could hold on to. Anything.

However, a scant eight weeks after her twentieth birthday, as Kagome fell screaming to earth, she found herself thinking that this had actually been a very silly thing to wish, _a very silly thing indeed_, and she decided that maybe she didn't really want to connect with the past after all if it meant connecting with the ground too.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard she concentrated, her miko powers did not seem to be helping her fly.

"_Oh—"_ she screamed, her arms spread wide, hugging the air, "—_shiiiiit!"_

She couldn't stop tumbling. Her clothing snapped and cracked. Her heart thundered. The vaulting sky spun around her, vast and blue, and it was all she could do suck in air for another scream.

"I'm gonna_ diieeeeee_!"

Kagome knew that she was panicking, and that panicking was a _very bad idea_ right now, but _goddammit_, she felt freaking _justified_ in a little panic this time. She was so far above the ground—miles, it seemed—that she could see from edge to edge of this hidden world.

None of it looked very soft. At all.

Everything came in flashes as she fell. Craggy mountainsides—skims of cloud across the ocean of a sky—a grinning white skull rising from the forest—spindly skeletal birds in the air, so far away that they looked like little mouse bones—sharp ragged rocks—

_Oh, god, someone please help me!_

Her thoughts came in flashes too, whipping through her mind. She thought of her family sleeping at home, who would never find her. She thought of the skull below, and how it _grinned_ at her. She thought of Inuyasha, who she really wished was here right now to save her. She thought of her father. She thought of her first cat. She thought of her sad empty eggshell of a life, and how she had _wasted_ it.

She thought of how she was going to die in a tomb.

She even thought momentarily—and quite, quite angrily!—of Sesshoumaru. Who, indirectly, was going to finally have managed to kill her off after all.

But most of all she thought of the ground and the intimate relationship she was about to have with it.

_Dear God_, she wrote in her mind, her throat hitching, _if you get me out of this, I'll be ever so good, and do all sorts of good, good things; I can't think of anything right now, but I promise you'll be really impressed!_

_P.S. Any time now would be good._

The blue dome of the sky was now above her as she faced the heavens, and for a moment she seemed to be steady, suspended in quiet freefall. At some point she had stopped screaming. Who would hear her?

Instead, she felt the wind through her fingers, heard the sky roaring at her. The sun shone blurred and gold through her tears. _I'm flying_, she lied to herself.

Then the wind caught and spun her over again, and the forests spread before her, a green blanket from horizon to horizon. No, Kagome thought, her heart seizing up, no, there was no pretending. This was not at all like flying. Flying was happy and magical. She was going to _die_. She was going to die a _virgin_. It didn't get any less magical than that.

She could just hear the universe laughing.

—Hm.

Actually, she really could hear something. Though it didn't sound much like a laugh. It was shrill and piercing and unearthly, and—_ah_. At some point she must have started screaming again. Or maybe—

—_Wait_—

Kagome twisted around in midair.

Twenty or so feet away, regarding her with empty eye sockets, was a bird made of bone.

Kagome gaped back at it.

And as she stared, it clacked its beak twice, arched its spindly neck, and let out another blood-boiling shriek.

_Oh._

For a long minute her brain lagged behind what she was seeing. Then synapses sizzled and sparked to life; her heart fired up and revved into gear; her face lit up like the sun.

"Oh!" she said. "Yes! _Yes!_ I know you! _YES!_" She laughed out loud. Yes! Creepy morbid angels had come to rescue her! She was saved! Saved! Saved!

The bird cocked its head at her and drifted a little closer.

"That's right! C'mon! I'm right here!" She smiled at it. "Good zombie bird. _Pretty_ zombie bird. Come to Kagome!"

The bird stared.

"Just a little closer. _Please_. C'mon now…come to auntie Kagome. Good bird."

The bird drifted a few feet back.

"Wait. Don't do that—"

A few feet further back.

Her eyes flicked down to the ground and back. Her smile became strained. "Please tell me you're actually here to save me and this isn't some kind of cruel joke."

As if in answer, the bird clacked its beak again, letting out a rattling sort of warble. Flared out its tattered wings.

And went wheeling and turning away.

"No! No, no, _nonononono_, don't do that! Here birdie!" She waved madly at it. "Good zombie bird! Come back!" Her throat caught on a sob. "Come _back__!_"

She was doomed! Doomed! Doomed!

"You!" She swung her finger at the skull of the once Inu no Taisho. "This is all your fault! You and your stupid pearl and your stupid sons! Your stupid, _stupid sons!_" Her fists tightened. "If you weren't already so dead, I'd—"

"Skie-_skrreeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiikk_!"

Her mouth snapped shut. She looked down.

The bird was coming up from below her.

Coming up _fast_.

She spread her arms to control her fall, angling her body towards it. With a gasp she reached out—

_Oh, shit,_ was her last coherent thought, _this is really gonna_—

* * *

Kagome sank to her knees. Heaved a shuddering breath. Fell forward, boneless, onto her hands and dug them in the wiry grass. Then her elbows gave out too and she flopped onto the ground, gasping, white suns still blazing behind her eyes.

"Guh," she said.

Behind her she could hear the bird clacking and rattling. Little squawks of distress punctuated the rustle of decayed feathers dropping around her. As she blinked back the hot white daze the creature set her eardrums ringing with a long, distressed, throaty shriek.

Kagome agreed wholeheartedly.

"Sorry about that," she mumbled into the dirt. Her voice was weak. "I didn't mean to hit you so hard."

The sounds of its nervous preen stopped. Kagome struggled to turn herself over, but all her muscles had turned to warm lead; all her bones to water. She felt like she was melting and flowing into the ground. The throbbing in her limbs, for the moment, was a distant sort of ache, like it wasn't really _her_ body that was hurting. She was very grateful for that.

Hissing through her teeth, she redoubled her efforts and tried to move her arm. A wet pop followed. Her body shuddered again and she resigned herself for a long while to lying in the grass.

When she finally managed to roll herself over—how long it took, she didn't know—she lay on her back and stared into the sky through foreign trees. "Hey there," she said, giving her skeletal companion a weak smile.

Kagome felt a bizarre sense of camaraderie with the bird. She often got that way with people—er, _entities_?—she had almost died with. It was hard not to, when she could still feel its screams rattling up through its hollow throat and its ribs splintering under her palms.

Last time, she had had Inuyasha to take the brunt of the hit, and last time, they had only fallen a very short way before they reached the birds. This had been very different.

This time she had had plenty of time to build up momentum.

She could only remember jagged pieces of the fall, but the _hit_—it was all twisted metal pain and broken glass thoughts and smoldering disaster.

They had hit like a ten car pileup.

A white-hot blaze had exploded to life inside her skull and swamped her vision. Every bone in her body jolted out of place. And she must have blacked out for a second, because the white wildfire grew until the sounds were white, the pain was white, her thoughts were _white_.

She had probably already been screaming but at that point the bird began shrieking too, and the shrieking had been black, and at once consciousness had blasted back through her. She could feel it heaving its ratty wings below her. Could feel it claw the air. Could feel them plunge downward.

They fell a thousand feet together in a twisting, screaming tangle of limb and bone, before the bird managed to pull up, and Kagome, hanging on by only a clavicle, dared to open her eyes.

Below her dangling feet, watching, the massive skull of the former Inu no Taisho _grinned_.

Somehow after that she had managed to swing her leg up behind its ribcage and hook it over the spine. She then had shut her eyes tight and decided not to open them again until she was on the ground.

And here she was.

With a few more wet pops—_oh, that's one's going to hurt in the morning. And oooh, that one's hurting right now_—she accomplished a sitting position. She considered this to be a very great accomplishment and would have given herself a pat on the back, but the action may have hemorrhaged something. So she made it a mental pat. A gentle one.

Her body made a few more exciting twinges and a last pop as she staggered to her feet.

"Well," she said to the bird in a pleasant tone, "I really fucked this one up." She dusted her hands on her pajamas.

The bird tilted its head. She imagined it would have blinked at her if it could.

"You probably don't know what a bed is, but I could've been in one right now. But _noooo_…had to be _curious_…had to want a _mystery_, an _adventure_…" She blinked back tears and turned away. "Well, I wanted some link to the past, and here it is. A tomb. A dead place full of dead things. Just as dead as everything else I left behind. Wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something, huh?"

As if to punctuate her statement, the bird let out a thunderous squawk, beat its mighty wings—

And flew away.

_Great._

She didn't know the way out. In fact, she wasn't sure there _was_ a way out. Myouga was the one who got them out the last time, and he had to use some kind of spell. She wished she could remember what it was, but it hadn't been in Japanese. She wasn't sure it was even in _words_.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked around at the sun-kissed trees. "_Now_ what do I do?"

* * *

Kagome threw rocks at the Inu no Taisho.

Actually, first she had thrown a small tantrum. "Argh!" she had screamed, shaking her fist at the skull high above her. "_Shit!_ I'm not supposed to be here! Does it _look_ like I've got the staff of heads? What the hell! What did I do _wrong_?"

Not only did the Inu no Taisho not answer, he looked entirely too smug about the whole situation, in her opinion. So she threw a rock at him. Then another one.

_First defacing historical artifacts, now desecrating graves? Maybe it's a good thing grampa isn't here to see this._

Her aim fell dramatically short though, what with him being at the top of the mountain. This was highly unsatisfying.

Kagome had stomped around for a few minutes, muttering some very choice words. Then, picking up a good throwing rock, she had started to march up the mountainside.

She needed to explore her surroundings anyway. This just gave her direction and focus. Besides, from higher up she'd have a better vantage point of the valley.

And she was going to wipe that grin off the Inu no Taisho's face even if it meant knocking out all his teeth.

Kagome found it funny that, after cutting herself off from the rest of the world for so long, she was now, quite literally, cut off from the rest of the world. The forest was eerily silent—no birds, no insects, nothing. She began to have the frightening suspicion that she was the only thing alive here.

Other than the flora, of course. The thin primary forest that had been here before had thickened and matured into a vast, sprawling sea of leviathan trees. Cliffs that had been bare were now lush and alive. And of course, there was the green-shrouded corpse of the Inu no Taisho. Emerging here and there from the canopy was the top of an armored spike, or the curve of a rib; the boulder she had just passed was really a rusted plate of metal.

The creeping foliage had barely taken hold last time she was here. Back then, the Inu no Taisho had been dead for what, fifty years? This forest had had five hundred and fifty years to fill itself in.

It was no wonder the bone-bird was so confused by her arrival. It hadn't had any visitors for _half a millennia_.

And even though she had known, consciously, that she was still in the present, she realized then that for a moment it had _felt_ like she had returned to the past. But that feeling was dispelled as she took in the changes. This was not the black pearl of the feudal era.

It was familiar enough to hurt, though.

As she walked, she tried to take a step back and assess the current situation, scraping together a mental list.

Pros:

1. I'm alive. Yay!

2. My instincts were totally right about that statue. I'm so smart.

3. Alive!

Cons:

1. I don't know the way out.

2. If I'd just left the damn statue alone I wouldn't be in this mess. I'm so stupid.

3. Everyone who knows the way out is dead.

4. I'm alive but in a tomb. Does that mean I'm buried alive?

Kagome crumpled up her mental list and threw it in her mental trash bin.

The climb was long and slow; there were no footpaths to follow—seeing as there was no one else to walk them—and the body of a dead demon dog didn't make for very even terrain. Her ascent had her zigzagging back and forth across the Inu no Taisho's knees and the foothills they were braced against. _Some of those foothills are probably actual feet_, she thought morbidly.

Even worse: she had lost her slippers during the fall.

"The joys of climbing a mountain barefoot," she sighed to herself, hopping on one foot after an attack by a particularly vicious and pointy stone. "I don't know how Inuyasha always did it. Oh, wait—demon skin."

Kagome shot the Inu no Taisho a dark look over her shoulder.

At around what she assumed to be midday (she didn't know what sort of hours the sun kept here; after all, it had been night when she'd fallen through the pearl), she started to hum just to break the awful silence. It unnerved her—this place was so peaceful, but the peace was deceptive. There would be no harsh, violent death here, but a slow, lonely one. The kind she was always afraid of.

It was so quiet that when the sky rumbled overhead she shrieked and dropped to the ground.

When it boomed again she blinked several times, then slowly tilted her head upwards.

Dark thunderheads blotted the sun; the sky was a cold iron gray. Distant lightning flashed near the horizon. As another growling rumble echoed through the valley, a single drop of water splashed on her nose.

"Oh, please don't," she said.

The heavens opened up and poured down on her.

Kagome swore and jumped to her feet, pushing her wet bangs out of her eyes. It had gone from sprinkle to deluge with no in-between whatsoever. Squinting through the wall of water, she caught a glimpse of a rock formation through the trees, deeper in the foothills, and immediately set off towards it. Rivulets of water were already forming around her feet and she quickened her pace, splashing through them.

She was an experienced enough camper to know that when you got caught in a storm on an open mountainside, you went for shelter, _fast_.

She broke through the trees at a dead run, zeroing in on the looming shadow up ahead. The sky was so dark now it was practically twilight.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the clearing. Kagome sloshed to a stop.

It was a tiny shrine.

There was a pair of temple dogs in front of it, smaller than the ones she had found the pearl in. They only came to about waist-high. More statues perched on the tipped-up eaves; small stone foxes. The building was otherwise small and simple. No windows.

Kagome moved to stand in front of the door, rain streaming down her face. Her hand reached out and traced the scrollwork flowers that trailed down the doorframe. Steeling herself, her heart in her throat, she grabbed the iron handle and pulled.

The door groaned and hardly moved an inch; throwing her whole weight into it, her feet slipping against the muddy ground, she managed to drag it wider. A wave of stale air rushed out in a dusty sigh.

Before she wriggled through the narrow opening, she scanned around the shrine and grabbed a broken stick from the ground. Then she slipped through and slowly heaved it shut again from the other side, leaving a thin crack for air.

Her ragged breathing sounded deafeningly loud in the pitch black of the shrine. Clutching the stick in front of her, she sent up a silent prayer and slowly, carefully, began to channel spiritual energy into it.

A dull rosy glow spread throughout the single room.

The back of the door was cast iron. The walls had been wood on the outside, but this was only a thin shell. On the inside they were lined with huge slabs of rock. Kagome held her makeshift light up higher.

The walls were covered in flowers.

They scrawled across the stone canvas in madcap loops and swirls, every kind of flower imaginable—lilies, snapdragons, sunflowers and more, flowers she'd never even seen or heard of. Engraved straight into the rock, they arced up across the ceiling and down again without break, like the artist had gone mad. The waterfall of flowers spread out under her feet in twists and clusters.

The only place that wasn't covered in them was the marble coffin that rested in the center

Kagome hadn't discovered a shrine at all. She had discovered a crypt.

Holding her breath, she carefully approached the tomb, casting the marble in dusky rose. She knelt in front of it and held the light up close so she could read it, even though by now she already knew what it would say.

She had known before she even took the pearl out of the stone dog's eye.

_Rin._

"_They say she was laid to rest on a bed of flowers and pearls_," Kagome whispered, echoing her grandfather's words. The princess of the mountain. The princess whose house had been guarded by two stone dogs, one with a sliver of moon on its brow.

Kagome blinked back tears, shaking her head. She should have known the moment she discovered the identity of the statue. Even without a name, she should have known. Who else would have had that particular figure to guard her?

She had been thrown by the noble title, but that made sense too. Rin _was_, in her own right, a princess.

She was the adopted daughter of the Prince of the West.

Back at the shrine, the moment she saw something glinting inside the statue's broken eye, Kagome had guessed the truth. And she had been certain once she spoke with her grandfather. Because she had interpreted his words a little differently than he had: the princess was buried _within_ the pearl.

Hot tears burned searing trails down Kagome's cheeks. Rin's name blurred in front of her, and as Kagome's concentration wavered, the light from the stick dimmed and died. Visions swam before her in the quiet dark, memories of a little girl in a checkered kimono, dancing through endless fields of flowers, her laughter bright and sunny.

And as the image followed of a stark white figure, standing vigil in the corners of that field, she bent over and sobbed, her heart reaching out. For one thing ran over and over through her mind:

Someone had given Rin a stone garden to play in.

* * *

She slept through most of the rain, on the floor of the crypt.

When the skies let up, she had gone outside and gathered up wildflowers, still wet from the fresh rain. She laid them on top of the coffin, beside the brittle husks that already decorated it from who knew how many centuries ago. Apologizing for her intrusion, she said a prayer over the grave, then sealed it up again from the outside.

And then she turned her face towards the mountainside above her, and began to climb.

She didn't know how long she scaled the ancient slope. The rocks were wet with rain and her movements were leaden, but her body moved as if on its own, plodding ever upwards. There was nothing left to do but go up. The skull slowly grew closer.

When she was maybe two-thirds of the way up, she found an opening. The cleft in the rock was just wide enough to crawl through. The rock, she saw, was not really rock at all, but a veneer of rust over bone. Sliding through on her stomach, she emerged between two leviathan ribs.

And found herself inside the massive chamber she had last seen so many centuries ago.

It was like the inside of some vast cathedral. Crisscrosses of sunlight slanted through gaps in the ribs, filling the chamber with muted light. Curtains of vines hung down from the bones like tangled green tapestries.

As she slid to the ground on a twisted vine, her feet touched down on a carpet of softest moss. The whispery crackling it made gave away what she knew lay beneath it.

The crunching whispers trailed her as she padded farther into the chamber, her breath taken by the immensity of it. Somehow, she had forgotten how large it was.

As she walked through the echoing vault, she found herself drawn by her memories to things that she knew. She walked past the warped and melted place where she had been bathed in acid. Past the gaping hole where a wounded dog had once fled, the opening now covered over by ivy. Past the slashes cut into the walls from a battle long ago.

And, at last, towards the dais at the end of the chamber. The one she had stood on when she drew tessaiga so many years ago, metal flames arching up behind it.

As Kagome approached it a weight grew in her chest. The weight grew heavier and colder with each step until it was like she carried an icy stone in her stomach, chilling her heart. There was something on the dais ahead of her. Something that hadn't been there before. She wanted to go back. She didn't want to know what the thing was, what it was that lay there, looking so wrong yet so familiar.

Her feet stopped at the end of the platform, the whispery crunching fading into silence.

There was a body on the dais.

He looked exactly as she remembered him, except different. He was thinner than in her memories, his tall, long-limbed form only accentuating how slender he really was. He wore nothing but white. No armor, no adornments, only starkest white, like the snowy locks that spilled over the edge of the dais and onto the ground. Vines twisted through them, and the moss that had crept up the platform was slowly taking him over, like the statues on the mountain being claimed back by the forest.

Everything was covered by a skim of dust, and Kagome thought that it was like the fairy tale Snow White, looking inside the glass coffin at the corpse that lay perfectly preserved within. His ageless face was pale as marble, and just as still.

Stiller than a forgotten tomb, stiller than death.

Far too still.

"Oh," she breathed, sinking to her knees as the last strength she had bled out of her. Her legs crumbled beneath her like her hopes crumbled into dust and ash inside her. There was nothing to hold her up any more. She'd come all this way, had dared to maybe begin to hope. But there was nothing this cursed tomb had to give her but more graves. She shut her eyes, her cheeks growing wet. "You're dead…"

"Yes," he said.

Kagome's head lifted, tears streaking her face.

"What?" she managed weakly.

"Yes," Sesshoumaru repeated, still lying upon the dais. His voice was quiet but clear, the words rolling in his mouth as he seemed to consider them. Taste them. "Yes, I _am_ dead."

Her mouth opened, moving over words she couldn't seem to form. The moment felt unreal, like some midnight fever-dream. Like she was falling out of the sky all over again. She shut her mouth, swallowed, and tried again.

"You know," she said, her voice calmer than she thought it would be, "I've seen an awful lot of dead people, and most of them aren't nearly so…so, ah…" she sought out the right word,"…chatty."

Minutes dragged by in silence. He looked dead again. Kagome hesitated, biting her lip, but when he still didn't answer she finally inched closer, moss crunching beneath her as she crawled on her hands and knees until she could see his face. His eyes were open now, gazing up at the skeletal ceiling far overhead. Glassy.

"Sesshoumaru?"

The youkai did not move. She was close enough to reach out and touch him. She didn't dare.

"Sesshoumaru?" she repeated, voice wavering. He was splayed out funny, she noticed, like he had been tossed there, or like he had let himself drop without a care. He was so thin and pale it was unreal, and he didn't look alive but he didn't act dead. She felt herself go colder.

"Are you a ghost?" she asked.

The glass of his eyes was like sea glass, dulled and worn. "Yes," he said after a long moment. "I am a ghost."

For awhile she had to shut her eyes, squeezing back tears. It didn't seem right to mourn him when he was right there in front of her. She didn't think he'd like it. But her heart hurt, and she had the strangest sense of loss. All those weeks she spent thinking about him, wondering if he had survived, if he might still be alive…_all those weeks spent hoping_…and he had died, long, long ago. His soul left behind to haunt this empty, lonely tomb.

Forever.


End file.
